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Power Dynamics in Speculative Forms

Chthonic writing and counter-narratives of embodied femininity in Sue Rainsford’s Follow Me to Ground (2019)

Marine GALINÉ

Résumés

Cet article se propose d’analyser comment l’autrice dublinoise Sue Rainsford réinvente les rapports de force entre les genres et entre l’humain et le non-humain dans son premier roman, Follow Me to Ground, paru en 2019. Ce conte à mi-chemin entre le réalisme magique et la fable dystopique met en scène une nouvelle expérience du féminin à travers un personnage qui transcende les contraintes genrées par son ambivalence et son hybridité. Cette étude cherche également à montrer comment le décentrement de l’Anthropocène opéré par Rainsford à travers une imagerie naturelle typiquement irlandaise renouvelle les approches écoféministes en mettant au cœur de son roman une expérience incarnée de la Nature, de la terre et de l’écriture.

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1In a wider context of post-Celtic Tiger anxiety of collapse and fight for women’s bodily rights in Ireland, Dublin-based writer Sue Rainsdord’s debut novel, Follow Me to Ground (2019), aims to challenge power dynamics on several levels. Firstly, the reader embarks on a feminist tale of empowerment whereby the female experience is extricated from the bigotry which customarily underpins its language. Secondly, the novel operates a decentralisation from the Anthropocene which surprisingly transcends ecofeminist approaches: not only does Rainsford subvert traditional readings of Nature as female and oppressed, but she also demonstrates how the exploration of typically Irish natural motifs (such as the bog) informs new illustrations of female desire, reproductive capacities and the nuclear family. Finally, reading Follow Me to Ground brings to light a chthonian approach to writing itself: Rainsford’s language underlines the fruitful potential of words through a collapse of syntactic rules and generic boundaries reminiscent of Julia Kristeva’s sémiotique, while bringing forth a celebration of creativity and of the plasticity of language as an empowering force.

2Follow Me to Ground, for which Rainsford received the VAI/DCC Art Writing Award, the Arts Council Literature Bursary Award and a MacDowell Fellowship, is often labelled as a magic realist fairytale of maturing and self-fulfilment. The plot is centred around Ada, who lives on the borders of The Ground with her father. Both are seen as outcasts by the population who only tolerates their presence because of their healing capacities. They spend their days working on the bodies of people, whom they call Cures, to relieve them of their ailments. One day, Ada meets a man, one of her Cures (Samson), and starts a romantic and sexual relationship with him which slowly changes her perspective on her life and place in her father’s world.

3The novel is divided into four unequal parts (the first part being only two pages long), which are mostly told from the heroine’s first-person perspective. While much of the text focuses on the present time, albeit narrated in the past, that is to say on the linear progression of things, the reader is also confronted with several analepses and prolepses—narrative tears in the fabric of text-time which must be threaded back together in order to make sense of the whole story. What’s more, the novel is filled with narrative elements evocative of magic realism, a genre which traditionally designates the inclusion of fantastic and mythical elements in a realistic plot. Other contemporary Irish writers have turned to magic realism, especially in young adult and children's literature. Jan Carson (The Fire Starters, 2019) and Julia Armfield (Our Wives Under the Sea, 2022) both feature supernatural female characters who evolve in a modern world imbued with ancient folklore, while Deirdre Sullivan's Tangleweed and Brine (2017) offers a retelling of folktales from a feminist viewpoint. But in Follow Me to Ground, magic is not where the reader expects it: it is not in Ada’s and her father’s healing abilities, nor in the fact that they were born a very long time ago in The Ground, or that they need to open up bodies to work their healing in them—through Ada’s singing or the displacement of ailments and diseases. Since the narrative is mostly told from Ada’s perspective, magic actually appears in the interstices of the text, here and there, as when Ada marvels at Samson’s capacity to feel attracted to her (rather than being scared of her, as most people are). From time to time, short chapters are devoted to other people’s perspectives, such as those of Cures who remember their first encounter with Ada or her father. In these narrative gaps, the plot feels all the more anchored in a realistic background since the reader is offered welcomed landmarks (a car, a television, suspicion at Miss Ada’s forever young appearance, etc.), but these remain scattered and briefly described. That is why one may feel there is a certain timelessness to the narrative, despite the few realistic details mentioned above.

A Feminist tale of empowerment

4Alongside the fairytale—and thus timeless—dimension of Follow Me to Ground, Sue Rainsford saturates her work with reflections on what it means to be a woman in our postmodern society, especially in a country where constructions of femininity are so deeply rooted in conflicting views over women’s bodies and psyches. She thus perfectly aligns with Mary McGlynn’s observation that “irrealism is not the product of a particular environment or era so much as a tool used to engage with it” (McGlynn 9). Overall, one may say that her works combine environmental and feminist questions, conflating the collective, worldwide anxiety of climate change and the deeply personal and intimate experience of being a woman in the twenty-first century. Rainsford’s novel should also be read and analysed in the wider context of women’s rights in Ireland and the progressive, albeit unfinished, dismantling of the “containment culture” which, ever since the 1935 Carrigan Report and Criminal Law Amendment Act, increasingly repressed sexuality and women’s bodily rights (Smith 5). This wider context of cultural and societal oppression against women’s bodies particularly resonates with Rainsford’s first novel, as Follow Me to Ground was written prior to the 2018 referendum and the subsequent repeal of the Eighth Amendment, i.e., the ban on abortion.

5In an interview given to Electric Literature, Rainsford pointed to the metaphorical dimension of gendered discourse when it came to describing female bodies, and that she wished to extricate this experience from the constraints of Western language around sex and femininity. In other words, her fiction strives to expose the “inherent precarity female bodies are confronted with on a daily basis” (Rainsford On A Little Life np). The writer also acknowledged that the thematic content of her novel and her approach to writing were influenced by her endometriosis, which was diagnosed when she was twenty-two, two years before she started Follow Me to Ground. Celebrating the fact that she felt supported by her relatives and the medical staff (which is a luxury not shared by every woman), she remembered her linguistic epiphany around the poetic dimension of medical terms when taken out of context. To her, speculative fiction is an apt conduit for the exploration of femininity, which she apprehends as both weird and real, unlike everyday language which clouds and decentralises female experience (for instance menstrual advertising where blood was represented by blue liquid for a very long time).

6In the novel, sexual intercourse is thus depicted from a female point of view that staves off the Christian and Irish bigotry underpinning the language around femininity. Women are no longer asked to fulfil the impossible ideal of being both virginal and motherly, sexless and procreative. Ada for instance is a humanlike creature deprived of genitals who recalls her first sexual experience as one of misunderstanding and fear on both sides. She then learns about desire and longing, and when she feels attracted to Samson, she grows “an opening” (Rainsford, Follow Me to Ground 13) which she calls by many names, none of which are derogatory or insulting. On the contrary, this meaning-making process uses language in a playful way, with words such as “my pouch” or “my pucker” (13)—both sharing a homophonic and semantic continuity with the suggestive and gendered “purse,” while retaining a sense of amphibology. “Pouch” reminds the reader of the animal-like nature of a woman’s body, while “pucker” conjures up images of facial distortion and wrinkled skin. Neither of these semantic networks belongs with the traditional discourse that extols youth, female beauty and homogeneous bodily features.

7More generally, scenes of love-making in Follow Me to Ground are evocative illustrations of how the female viewpoint changes the language used: “lust” is a “sweet-hurt ache,” while penetration becomes an inverted process of consented reception, of “t[aking] Samson inside” (13). Interestingly, those scenes are not devoid of intensity and potential violence:

There wasn’t a day I didn’t want to swallow him whole. Not only up ’tween my legs but down my throat. The feel of him moving over me and our thighs skimming, our stomachs sealed tight. I’d opened up so many Cures but couldn’t think what he had inside him that would let him build this fire in me, this tingling that built and built until I thought it’d tear me apart. Couldn’t think how I’d changed so much in so short a time that I wanted it so badly, to be torn. (23)

  • 1 “La violence qui balafre la découverte de la différence sexuelle et continue à effrayer et à enchan (...)

8Sexual intercourse is written as an embodied experience of the Other as much as it is of the self, an epiphany that speaks of female desire and emancipation; Ada seems to be overwhelmed by her own lust, not by Samson himself. Through the internal focalisation, their interaction feels all the more organic, a brutal tale of growing, swallowing and tearing, of maturity and self-fulfilment which illustrates how violence is inherent to heterosexuality, as Julia Kristeva notes in Prélude à une éthique du féminin.1

  • 2 Notwithstanding Ada’s obvious Biblical name, Rainsford quotes Ada Lovelace as the main inspiration (...)

9As the spelling of her name suggests, the character of Ada conflates Adam’s myth of creation and Eve’s unquenched thirst for forbidden knowledge in the way she feeds off Samson’s body and uses him to garner information about life in the village nearby.2 Prior to becoming this self-aware, desiring body, Ada had an unconventional experience of her own femininity since her sense of self was only based on her healing capacities and on how she was designed by her father to be a healer. The father-daughter relationship depicted in the novel denounces the ways in which the female body can be serviceable and instrumentalized as Ada tentatively extricates herself from the role her father literally made her play. The scene where Ada understands the hybrid nature of her own self rests on traditional female gothic tropes of patriarchal and paternal violence which are progressively deconstructed:

But then I was seeing something.

A pile of waste that had no cause to be there.

Pale branches, mostly yellowish and thin. Or rather, they would have been branches, but their colour and shape weren’t right. Where had they come from? From some strange tree since extinct in our garden? But there were so many of them, it made no sense that they’d all tumbled at once, in this close spot, and then stayed here.

I reached for the closest one, long and thick, and once I had it in my hand I felt a sadness seep into me. A puffing, breathy kind of sadness that a Cure might feel right after they finished crying.

Father said my name in such a way I knew it wasn’t the first time.

- What are these?

What I wanted to say: What are these, and why are they crying?

I held the would-be branch above my head and looked up over my shoulder, could only see part of him – he’d crescented his arm to push the prickle-growth further aside, but otherwise he wasn’t moving.

- I’d forgotten they were here.

I turned around fully then, though my legs were scratching pinker and pinker and my dress getting torn besides. Snagged in a twirl around me. He was looking at the branch in my hand, but making no move to touch it. (91)

10In this passage, Father’s violence in the woods is equated with his unforgiving moral views and uncompromising attitude towards his daughter: the consonance in of “prickle,” “scratch” and “snag” suggests the cracks of bones breaking, and thus the threat of abuse against one’s brittle limbs. Moreover, “waste,”, “yellowish and thin” are evocative of a sickly body, while “extinct” testifies to the presence of death hovering despite Ada’s not ageing like normal people.

11Father is also introduced as a God-like name-giver (“said my name”), a maker of things and the creator of Ada after multiple attempts and failures. These experiments appear in the form of branches in piles, as though they had been tossed away and left aside. Because of Father’s callousness and lack of feelings for them, Ada does not feel special, but a tool, literally modelled and moulded by Father’s hands:

He was looking around for the roots again. Every time he moved he blocked a different side of the sun.

- Nothing sacred about birth, Ada. You know that. No matter the species.

- I know.

- Unspectacular business, coming into the world.

- Yes. I know.

These felled versions of myself. What about them could not cohere? What about them went wrong that the earth wouldn’t compact into organ or the branches blanch into bone?

- How many are there?

- How many tries? Including you?

I had a pain in my heart and put a hand there, heard myself make an angry bark of a sound, thinking heart was the wrong word to use. (93-94)

12Birth is thus desacralized, stripped of its religious and heteronormative dimension, while humanity is reduced to yet another species. Interestingly, Rainsford’s father figure recasts Barbara Creed’s “archaic mother,” borrowing her ability to give birth “without the agency of the opposite sex” (Creed 17). However, here, Father is a Pygmalion-like sculptor who extracts Ada from primordial matter—The Ground, which will be explored later in this paper—thus becoming a parthenogenetic mother, devoid of womb, the antithesis to mythical incarnations of the Virgin Mary. By dehumanising procreation, Rainsford subtly sheds light on Ada’s need for emancipation, in particular from her father, as seen in use of free indirect and free direct speech (in italics in the text):

I wanted to say It’s not how I was made that bothers me, or that it took you so long to get it right. It’s that you left these here, not caring that I might find them. It’s that you tossed these half-formed things away without ceremony. That you wouldn’t pretend, even in these few moments, that any of it was special to you at all.

What I knew he’d say in return:

Sound like a Cure’s gotten under your skin, Ada.

[…]

I moved around on my knees, finding the risen roots and spending an hour singing them backwards and down. Back into The Ground, back the way they came. (93-94)

13Besides, the emphasis on roots (“risen roots”) which Ada cannot find at first casts the novel back to the primordial obsession of Irish fiction with uprootedness. But while Ireland’s chtonic identity is mostly showcased as an obstacle to psychological and narrative stability (one may think of Maria Edgeworth’s 1800 Castle Rackrent for instance), it becomes a necessity in the case of Ada who refuses to go back to The Ground at the end of the novel. As Mary McGlynn points out, the ungrammaticality of Ada’s autodiegetic account, particularly its use of sentence fragments (McGlynn 12) reflects Rainsford’s lamenting of the failure of “existing modes of human agency,” (McGlynn 14) as much as her celebration of “human/animal/object assemblages that operate outside human control” (McGlynn 223).

14The last chapters of Follow Me to Ground thus translate as Ada’s ultimate emancipatory gesture while she relinquishes her status as compound, makeshift creation. Ada no longer feels like a gathering of natural parts but whole, with feelings. Her humanity is valued as a source of strength—even with a hole in her heart, even in sadness, Ada’s female body is a locus of empowerment that enables her to act on her own desires in an uncompromising way. Rainsford’s feminist approach to female desire involves a decentring from the traditional reproductive functions of heteronormative relationships. In the same way, Ada’s assertive femininity as non-procreative and desiring posits Follow Me to Ground as a counter-narrative to the “idealization and objectification of women as mothers and wives” which James Smith identifies as a defining trait of Ireland’s self-imposed discourse on moral and social respectability (Smith 3, 24).

15More generally, Rainsford literalises the poetic and feminist dimensions of language by peeling back its patriarchal subtext. This is illustrated when a character named Tabatha Sharpe explains that she sees every liquid red—water, rain, and of course blood:

Nothing wrong with me my whole life, ’less you count my red-dust-haze. I see red when it rains. When I look at any kind of water—a river or a lake or a stream:

Red

Red

Red

And when people go swimming or stand out in the rain, afterward they’re all dripping red. (38)

  • 3 “Ouvrir sur une représentation distincte entre le féminin et le maternel, c’est-à-dire à un sujet f (...)

16Here the water imagery is also conveyed by the writing’s fluidity: the word “red” is repeated three times, each occurrence occupying a full line while not being constrained by a sign of punctuation. On an ontological level, the red liquid is no longer limited to blood, it is stripped of its religious, societal and anthropological frame of reference. The process of deconstruction manifest in Rainsford’s novel thus works both ways. On the one hand, the female body is claimed back as non-maternal—what Merete Stistrup Jensen argues for in her essay on the inoperative concept of female writing: “to open up to a distinct representation of the feminine and the maternal, that is to say to a female subject that is not defined solely by the maternal function alone” (my translation)3. On the other hand, the nuclear family is redefined through the displacement of procreation to a third, mineral, and nonhuman place.

A decentring from the Anthropocene?

17Ecological feminism emerged as a theoretical tool in the 1970s and has come to encompass a variety of academic theories concerned with understanding the interconnected relationship between the domination of women and the domination of nature. In Rainsford’s debut novel, ecofeminist approaches are taken a step further. The Irish writer seems less interested in the equation between the oppression of women and patriarchal abuse of natural resources—what Val Plumwood calls the “backgrounding and instrumentalization of women” (21)—than in how the exploration of Irish traditional and natural motifs such as the forest, soil and wetlands informs new illustrations of female desire and bodily experience. Therefore, despite not being named as such, I would argue that Ada and Father’s Ground is a more universal rendition of the Irish bog, in the same way the town where the Cures come from remains an unspecific, nameless locale even though Rainsford acknowledged that it was inspired by her own Irish surroundings:

I’m happy with the American interpretation: some people said it reminded them of Mississippi or New Orleans. When I was writing I was actually thinking of the West Cork—I have visited there since I was 17 and spent a lot of time there when I was conceptualising the scene where Ada and the Father are digging a grave. Regarding the climate, I completed the first draft while living in Ranelagh in Dublin in 2013. It was a scalding hot summer and I was fixated on how the sun weathers things: you could say that it creates items of nostalgia because everything becomes bleached and faded even though they’re contemporaneous with daily life. With the place-names I tend to stay away from specifics—it’s something that I’ve struggled with at times, I think sometimes if a place is too recognisable it becomes distracting. I still want the place to feel quite real, it’s not unearthly—I’m not trying to create a different world. I wanted it to be some backwater place that doesn’t get too much traffic where there isn’t too much of a sense of a wider world, although it is vaguely referred to. The place-names speak of a vernacular. (Rainsford, Sue Rainsford, An Interview np)

18In this interview, Rainsford also mentions the influence of old Irish folktales, such as the changeling legend or the ancient belief in the curative properties of the bog if someone ill was to sleep in one. The bog and its peat have always been part of the Irish landscape, despite not being specific to the country (Finland, Scotland and of course Denmark have a lot of boglands). Boglands currently represent one sixth of Ireland’s surface area. From a geological point of view, the Irish bog is composed of several layers of sediments, white peat, mosses, minerals and plants. Some of these layers are called anaerobic since they do not require oxygen to develop, hence their distinguishing capacity to store and preserve objects and even bodies—the most famous of which being Seamus Heaney’s Tollund Man, who was Danish, and whose pictures in a book fascinated the poet (Heaney 27-28). Such palimpsestic and uncanny qualities explain why boglands, which have been present in Europe for thousands of years, are repeatedly identified as the loci of strange and supernatural manifestations—the apparition of sprites or will-o’-the-wisps in Ireland, to name but a few. And yet, they have also been a very real and concrete source of subsistence for a substantial proportion of the Irish population who exploited their peat for centuries (particularly during the nineteenth century), and still do in some areas.

19The Ground shares many characteristics with the Irish bog: it is a marginal site, a “contested and peripheral spac[e]” (Gladwin 51), green and brown, with a soft, mucky substance, like sinking sands, but also rejuvenating and healing qualities. Cures are put there, in the Burial Patch, completely immersed for a few days. When dug up, their sickness is supposedly gone, moved to a different place by Ada and her father, and their bodies healthy again, despite being brutalised by him. The Ground is therefore an avatar of the mother’s womb, where people can be born again: “We are [from The Ground], and it would take us back if it could” (12). Just like Father, The Ground is an illustration of Creed’s archaic mother, whom she describes as “primordial abyss, the point of origin and of end” (Creed 17), the “generative archaic mother, constructed within patriarchal ideology, as the primeval ‘black hole’, the originating womb which gives birth to all life” (Creed 27). It is always “hungry,”, it gnaw[s]” on things (Creed 53).

20Rainsford’s Ground could be seen as a literary echo of Marina Carr's bog in her 1998 play By the Bog of Cats, where traditional conceptions of motherhood are transcended. The main protagonist, Hester Swane, turns out to be both a victim of her own mother and an abusive mother herself as she eventually kills her own daughter, Josie. Conversely, Sarah's motherhood in Lee Cronin's The Hole in the Ground (2019) is more conservative, inasmuch as it deploys the traditional idealisation of the sacrificial mother one finds in Catholic and Gaelic tales. Cronin’s film is also centred around a liminal and sucking space, which breeds strange creatures and puts Sarah’s love for her son, Christopher, to the test. I would argue that Sarah’s body is mostly read under the lens of victimhood (her fringe of hair concealing a scar that is the traumatic mark of domestic abuse) and her exclusive relationship with her son. Despite sharing many features with Carr’s and Cronin’s neogothic narratives, Rainsford’s novel stands out as The Ground is in no way feminised nor is it associated with an ideal or archaic mother figure: it is referred to with the neutral pronoun “it” and spelled with capital letters, as though it were a nonhuman creature/space on its own. Rainsford aptly rewrites Roger Dadoun’s “anxiety of fusion and of dissolution” (Creed 20) by de-maternalising and defeminizing The Ground as birthplace. Ada was indeed created by her father there, as she recalls:

He’d tell me how he mixed my parts together and planted me inside of a sack. He tied it shut with a rope and then lowered me down during a thunderstorm, and kept the end of the rope tied to the knob on the patio door. (56)

21The reading of Ada’s birth comprises several intertextual layers, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the biblical Eve—all evocative of male parthenogenetic control and violence (the storm, the suggestive imagery of the rope and the sack). This violence inherent to birthing is also visible in the description of The Ground, a wild area which, according to Father, needed taming before the Burial Patch could be made:

“My father and I worked a long time on taming it just so, so that The Ground would cushion a body and yield it again. Only a small patch can be handled at a time. It takes huge strength. When you are older, we will try to rein in some more.” (39)

22While reinterpreting the act of birth-giving thanks to a new set of terms (“cushion a body,” “yield it again”), Rainsford’s choice of words suggests domesticating the wild, breaking it to match a human being’s will. It also harks back to the very origin of many boglands in Ireland whose history testifies to their ontological ambiguity: at the crossroads between ecological and human time, when the former is disturbed by the latter, they should be apprehended as “humanised landscapes” (Aalen 8), since many of them are not natural swamps but the results of several waves of deforestation starting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (the Plantation years) and aiming to extend the surface area of arable land. Many also appeared in the West after the Great Famine, when the deaths of thousands of small cottiers had left a great number of patches of land vacant.

23The presence of numerous bogs in Ireland is therefore the visible scar that betrays the imperialist and colonialist destruction of the country’s wilderness, which is itself the mirror image of capitalistic exploitation and decimation of natural areas on a global level. Hence the natural affiliation of Ada and her father with a peculiar ecosystem which the Cures and the rest of the population do not understand and avoid at all costs. As Ada notes at the beginning of the novel:

Father was always more creaturely than me.

There were nights when he’d let his spine loosen and go running on all fours through the woods, leaving sense and speech behind. (7)

24The wild and the primitive are here embraced by the protagonists, rather than derogatory labels imposed on somebody. Sense and speech, usually deemed superior by mankind and a determining trait that differentiates humans from animals, are here seen as expendable, unnecessary. By embracing their “creaturely” nature, both healers seem to claim back a form of savagery which used to be weaponized in British colonialist discourse against the Irish. Boglands have also been closely affiliated to Catholic barbarism and primitiveness ever since the sixteenth century: Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland, published in 1596, famously identified raised boglands in the West (like the bog of Allen, which is also mentioned in James Joyce’s “The Dead”) as hideouts for Catholic insurgents, while William King’s treaty “Of the Bogs and Loughs of Ireland” (1685) claimed that bogs in the North East were haunted by the ghosts of Catholics killed during the Battle of the Boyne. Ada and Father’s marginalised position in the diegesis (in their identity, craft and location in the fringes of the nameless town) appear to match the traditional hierarchy and power dynamics between nature and culture as summarised by Val Plumwood, and which ecocriticism seeks to challenge:

With the rise of colonial conquest and expansion and the ideology of progress as technological conquest, nature as the primitive and as the past from which certain ‘advanced’ human cultures have supposedly risen is also represented as the dualised underside of the concept of civilisation, in the contrast of civilisation (reason) versus primitivism (barbarism or savagery), and in the ideology of racism as the contrast of higher, civilised races to lower, backward races. (Plumwood 107)

25Plumwood’s approach would cast Father as the “underside” and “backward” Other needed by the colonialist discourse to uphold its ideology. Yet, as previously mentioned, Father is a complex figure of authority and power that strives to control his progeny the way he controls his metamorphic body. Despite being clearly identified as a shapeshifter (he can turn into a bear at night), he takes on the role of the coloniser who tries to civilise a newly conquered territory (The Ground) and its dwellers (Ada). The animalisation of Father’s character therefore complicates a traditional ecocritical reading of the novel and relocates Father to the long-lasting tradition of Irish gothic villains, such as Stoker’s Dracula or Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Both are shapeshifting vampires who have been analysed as embodiments either of the colonial oppressor or of the vengeful subaltern. By having Father encapsulate the Irish double-bind between oppressor and oppressed, a distinctive mark of Protestant gothic writers of the Victorian era, Rainsford’s novel subverts the typical interplay between predator and prey we find in ecofeminist and ecocritical theories: the main obstacle to Ada’s growth is a chimeric figure of the in-between, a wild and parthenogenetic creature who wishes to control his own creation, a postmodern and post-Anthropocentric version of the psychoanalytical figure of the Father:

  • 4 “Espace avant l’espace, chora, […] nourricier et broyeur à la fois, antérieur à l’Un, au Père, au m (...)

A space before space, chora, […] both nourishing and crushing, prior to the One, the Father, the word and even the syllable: a modality of meaning that is anterior to signification and which I call “semiotic.”4 (my translation)

  • 5 The digging image is prominent in Seamus Heaney’s poetry, particularly when he compares his own pen (...)

26We can posit The Ground as the chora-like space which recasts the bog both as “an implicitly feminized space and as a site, not of economic production, but of sacrificial expenditure” (McLean 53), to which I would add that it is also a space which allows Ada to engage in semiotic experimentations with language and further her emancipation as woman and as narrative authority—mirroring, somehow, the writer’s own capacity to dig into the materiality of the Irish soil/ground and unearth her own writing style.5

A chthonian approach to writing itself

27The reader’s very first encounter with Ada’s story is one of rhythmic unpredictability and linguistic polyphony:

The summers here are made of long, untended grass and flat, lemon light. Baking ground. Sunshine-haze. Shadows cast so dark and deep they seem as solid and alive as the bodies that throw them. (3)

28The novel thus starts with a synaesthetic evocation of light: “flat” and “lemon” combine elements of shape, colour and smell, while the reference to baking suggests the heat of the ground itself. A celebration of hybridity and of the embodied experience of the natural environment appear at the core of those opening lines, on the thematic and linguistic levels. Besides, short, verbless sentences appear next to longer and more complex ones, creating unregular rhythmic patterns which are also seen on the macro level of paragraphs, mimicking at times the layout of poetry. Rainsford’s writing often implies playing with syntactic rules in a way that is reminiscent of Kristeva’s semiotic language:

  • 6 “…le flux sensoriel, les gestes, les images et les écholalies (investissement des vocalises pré-lin (...)

… the sensorial flow, gestures, images and echolalia (investment of pre-linguistic vocalisations: intensities, frequencies, and rhythms), which I call a “semiotic receptable (chora),” which already have meaning without having signification, the latter being constructed with the acquisition of symbolic rules (of phonetics, grammar and logic).6 (my translation)

29Throughout the novel, the author experiments with hybridity in a language where the human and the animal coalesce:

Back in the kitchen even the mismatched buttons of my dress seemed scalded by the heat as I brought them through their cat-eye holes. I let the patterned cloth hang from my fist and watched its slow twirl, sodden and limp, dropping it in the milky-watered basin. It made a thirsty, gulping sound, diminishing for a moment the soapy swirls that had formed so thickly over Father’s shirt and my smock from the day before. (164)

30The buttonholes of Ada’s dress are “cat-eye holes,” her cloth slowly twirling is compared to a “sodden and limp” snail, an animal that is “thirsty” and makes a “gulping sound,” while the basin seems to be filled with a milky liquid. What is more, the scorching heat of the nameless place where Ada and her father live seems to awaken the animal qualities of inanimate objects (mostly garments and apparels), to breathe life into the lifeless, just like the numerous assonnances in /s/ and /w/ echo the “soapy swirls” of the wet piece of cloth. This visceral experience of writing responds to Emily Carr’s seventh rule of ecofeminist gothic which urges writers to “[r]econnect language with sensory experience—no, more than that, with carnal participation in the world” (Carr 162).

31Furthermore, we have already mentioned how the last part of the novel sees Ada embracing a new life without her father, a life that allows her to fully experiment with her senses and the most human characteristic of her hybrid body—language. The Cures she used to tend to have been replaced by natural elements which she also tries to heal through her singing:

With Father gone all these years and no Cures coming there are few habits that I keep, save tending to the sorrel leaves.

Turning over and over their slim, succulent bodies that carry their creases like much-worn leather.

Coming into summer I always mutter a haze of warning to keep at bay the lustful blood-vein moth, but still most mornings I come outside and find the leaves are ravaged. The edges robbed of their svelte curves.

I speak to them, saying their name aloud, mostly for the pleasure of the first ‘r’ rippling into its twin.

Sorril,

Sorrelle,

Sorreil. (181)

32Ada’s tending to the sorrel leaves is one of the few habits she has kept. In Ada’s mouth, the leaves are animals, both alive (“succulent bodies”) and dead (“much-worn leather”), vulnerable and preyed upon by humanised “lustful blood-vein moths.” As Ada sings to the leaves in the hope of reviving them, she marvels at the phonic possibilities of the double “r” and its “twin” sound, which she turns into a graphic palimpsest where “s,” “e” and “l” are also doubled, and where every reader might find themselves lost in double-entendre and linguistic plurality. One might see the word “sorry” underneath, the Italian “Sorelle” (“sisters”), the French pronouns “il” and “elle” or even the French equivalent of “ear”—“oreille” (and, of course, the French translation of “sorrel,” “oseille,” which share the same root).

33Natural elements are therefore present in the plot/diegesis and in the discourse. The passage quoted celebrates Ada’s symbiotic relation with her environment but also that between her language and the reality it depicts through motifs of ingestion and orality: the oral pleasure of saying and eating. Ada as a first-person narrator revels in the uncanny quality of language (Ganz 93), “a language of transcendence [that] work[s] through the ecological sublime” (Smith note 23, 146) by confronting the self with the abject of the natural world. Discussing bodily fluids and boundaries in Powers of Horror (1982), Julia Kristeva theorizes on the integrity of the human body and the threat represented by what she calls the abject—lurking, “ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable” (Powers 1). Abjection is often associated with a female otherness that unsettles the patriarchal system, a process that is also examined in the gothic. Kristeva reminds us of the two major polluting elements that regularly confront the human body: feces, and menstrual blood (Powers 71). To her, feces and their equivalents (rot, infectious diseases, corpses) constitute a threat from the outside. Conversely, menstrual blood threatens bodily integrity from the inside.

34Follow Me to Ground explores the abject through the literal and linguistic dissection of human and animal bodies right from the start: the first part, which is only two pages long, translates Ada’s obsession with and fear of slugs coming out of the drain when the rain is too heavy:

I see one: its blind snout appearing—a thumb-sized black snake departing the rim of the cracked drain’s edge. It heads for the dry grass that sits like crust over-cooked around the lush innards of the lawn.

If Father were here he’d scatter salt.

He’d pour it down the drain.

If I’d the stomach for the sizzle and stink their thousand corpses would make I’d do the same.

Father didn’t hate slugs, but he was wary of them.

Liquid and solid, they’re neither one thing nor the other, and they take their time in coming. (4)

35The vocabulary chosen to describe the slug is corporeal, reminiscent of the human body (“thumb-sized,” “heads for,” “innards,” “stomach”). The text itself becomes chimeric, a third space where the human and the animal merge. We can notice the prominence of food-related elements as well (“dry,” “crust,” “overcooked,” “salt” and of course “stomach”), which once more highlights the importance of one’s physical experience of the senses, of ingestion. To Ada, slugs are abject because they transgress borders: neither liquid nor solid, or rather both, they are slow creatures and yet their progress is unstoppable. Just like The Ground, animals and Nature in general are both part of the self and threats to its integrity.

36Rainsford, who regularly acknowledges her debt to Julia Kristeva (Tivnan), seems to have designed a language that is able to “embody the corporeal in language through the experience of writing” (“incarner la substance corporelle dans le langage par l’expérience de l’écriture,” Kristeva Prélude 175). When discussing Algernon Blackwood’s “The Touch of Pan” (1917), David Punter also touches upon this notion of a chthonian language that feeds on the linguistic qualities of natural elements:

What is going on in that phrase, it seems to me, is an attempt to incarnate a world in language: to make a form of words into a magical incantation which is capable of bringing a world into being and which thereby asserts a formative power of language, a primordial power of language, even a metaphorically “nonhuman” or “pre-human” language which will undercut and undermine our attempts to use language for our own anthropocentric ends. (Punter 54)

37Finally, we need to go back to an excerpt previously analysed, when Ada confronts her father with the dead branches he has discarded in his numerous attempts to create her, to see how natural and human elements coalesce again on the diegetic but also textual levels:

But then I was seeing something.

A pile of waste that had no cause to be there.

[…]

- What are they?

His nose moved a half-inch up his face, came down again.

- Your predecessors.

I knew what he meant. Right away I knew, but my thoughts kept darting around. I said

- They’re branches.

On one side of the branch I could see an indentation. A divot. Very smooth.

- That’s the problem. They should be bones.

I wanted to say It’s not how I was made that bothers me, or that it took you so long to get it right. It’s that you left these here, not caring that I might find them. It’s what you tossed these half-formed things away without ceremony. That you wouldn’t pretend, even in these few moments, that any of it was special to you at all.

What I knew he’d say in return:

Sound like a Cure’s gotten under your skin, Ada. (92-93)

  • 7 « au plus près de cette voix [de femme] qui n’arrive à se placer que dans les intervalles du discou (...)

38The text is structured around a constant opposition between natural and bodily elements, so much so that they seem to unite in Ada and in the text itself: the use of hyphenated words to create new compound nouns partakes in a celebration of creativity and of the plasticity of language as an empowering force. The divot Ada sees on the branch suggests a small patch (of grass, usually) removed from a flat surface, a hole made by a violent stroke. From an ecocritical perspective, the divot is like a scar left by a human being on a natural element. By comparing it to an indentation, which conjures up the blank space left at the beginning of a line of writing, Ada ties the natural surface of the branch in with that of a text, turning it into a hybrid compound, animal, human, mineral and textual. From a feminist viewpoint, Ada’s tongue is almost “as close as possible to this [woman’s] voice which can only find its way in the interstices of masculine discourse, in rupture, in strangeness.”7

Conclusion

39In his seminal monograph, published in 2016, Derek Gladwin suggested the coinage “bog gothic” to refer to specific Irish narratives such as Bram Stoker’s The Snake’s Pass (1890), a choice Donna L. Potts validated in her own study of environmental writing in Irish fiction:

The Bog Gothic may be read as a sub-category of EcoGothic, thus providing a productive way to examine the intersections of colonialism, culture, natural history, and the Gothic in Irish literary and cultural production. (Potts 82)

40Follow Me to Ground taps into the imagery of its bog gothic ancestors in the ways it extols “the exotic and sublime dimensions of these marginalised landscapes” (Gladwin 40) and encourages us to “move beyond first wave ecocriticism, with its uncritical aesthetic appreciation of nature, to a critical consideration of how historic context shapes our view of nature” (Potts 82). Its postapocalyptic atmosphere subtly contrasts with its prelapsarian depiction of The Ground, a space that resists contamination through its processes of restoring human beings to a form of untainted integrity. But even such a powerful space can be threatened by the untimely (and unwelcome) presence of Samson when Ada decides to bury him in the Patch because of some sickness she imputes to his sister Olivia’s abusive behaviour. The last part of the novel narrates how Samson remains underground for too long and only emerges when his son visits Ada years after. Whether Samson and Olivia were really married, and Ada was manipulated by her lover, or Samson was abused by his own sister, and they had a son born of incest, the child appears as a monstrous enactment of the ailments of heteronormative relationships and of the nuclear family. But instead of pushing Samson away, Ada embraces him: “No matter if he’s cruel or governed by a hungry fever. No matter, because I’ll no longer be sat here with my heart unseeded and my insides crackling dry” (195).

41Ada’s last lines echo the scene with her father where he identifies pale and dry branches as remnants of previous experiments in The Ground (“cackling dry”). The ending of the novel confirms Ada’s relentless search for humanity, even in its most immoral aspects (cruelty or fever, ailments of the mind and of the body). The text does not strive to expose the monstrosity of the anthropocentric gaze, as most ecoGothic works do (Del Principe 2), but introduces a protagonist who is fascinated by it. Rainsford's work also transcends the traditional ecofeminist endeavour to think beyond power relations (Birkeland 31). While her second novel, Redder Days (2021), effectively delinks masculinity from power by featuring a former cult leader's incapacity to deal with the ecological disaster he was using to control his followers (Birkeland 31), Follow Me to Ground actually reasserts a form of feminine power through Ada's uncompromising and unethical behaviour. Therefore, Rosi Braidotti's post-human feminism appears as more operative a theory to fully appraise Rainsford's political subtext. Braidotti advocates for radical defamiliarization in order to “dislocate[e] the centrality of humans” (Braidotti 6) and, simultaneously, “re-naturaliz[e] the human” and “the feminist project” (Braidotti 77). Follow Me to Ground is a novel that dissolves boundaries between the human and nonhuman, as argued by dark ecology advocates such as Timothy Morton, to better expose the frailty of both, and encourage us to replace any form of centrism with rhizomatic thinking. As Sueellen Campbell writes, “we belong not only to networks of language and culture but also to the networks of the land” (136).

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Bibliographie

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Notes

1 “La violence qui balafre la découverte de la différence sexuelle et continue à effrayer et à enchanter l’hétérosexualité” (Kristeva Prélude 188).

2 Notwithstanding Ada’s obvious Biblical name, Rainsford quotes Ada Lovelace as the main inspiration for her character (Rainsford An Interview np).

3 “Ouvrir sur une représentation distincte entre le féminin et le maternel, c’est-à-dire à un sujet féminin qui n’est pas récupéré par la seule fonction maternelle.” (Jensen 6)

4 “Espace avant l’espace, chora, […] nourricier et broyeur à la fois, antérieur à l’Un, au Père, au mot et même à la syllabe : une modalité du sens antérieure à la signification et que j’appelle ‘sémiotique’” (Kristeva Prélude 179).

5 The digging image is prominent in Seamus Heaney’s poetry, particularly when he compares his own pen to his forefathers’ spade digging into the Irish turf in his 1966 poem “Digging” (Heaney 3-4).

6 “…le flux sensoriel, les gestes, les images et les écholalies (investissement des vocalises pré-linguistiques : intensités, fréquences et rythmes), que j’appelle un ‘réceptable (chora) sémiotique’, qui ont déjà du sens sans avoir de la signification, cette dernière s’élaborant avec l’acquisition des règles symboliques (de la phonétique, de la grammaire et de la logique).” (Kristeva Prélude 193)

7 « au plus près de cette voix [de femme] qui n’arrive à se placer que dans les intervalles du discours masculin, en rupture, en étrangeté » (Jensen 5).

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Référence électronique

Marine GALINÉ, « Chthonic writing and counter-narratives of embodied femininity in Sue Rainsford’s Follow Me to Ground (2019) »e-Rea [En ligne], 23.1 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2025, consulté le 18 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/erea/20392 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15ciy

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Auteur

Marine GALINÉ

Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne
Marine Galiné holds a PhD in Irish Studies on the study of femininity in nineteenth-century Irish Gothic fiction, under the supervision of Professor Sylvie Mikowski. Her research also focuses on the circulation of Gothic motifs in current popular culture and the interactions between body and space in these productions. She has published on Irish authors, from William Carleton to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, but also on Guillermo Del Toro, Mike Flanagan and Lee Cronin. She is currently a teaching fellow in English at the Campus des Comtes de Champagne (University of Reims) and an associate researcher at CIRLEP (Interdisciplinary Center for Research on Languages and Thought).

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